#nvidia

#nvidia

The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has charged three people with illegally exporting NVIDIA GPUs to China in violation of the Export Control Reform Act. NVIDIA's chips have become a critical component in the rush to train and run increasingly complex artificial intelligence models.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is working with a Southeast Asian company on plans to use Nvidia's Blackwell chips in Malaysia for AI research and development. The partner is a Tier 1 Nvidia cloud partner, meaning it gets priority access to Nvidia's latest chips directly from Nvidia. ByteDance plugs in through that relationship to access hardware it cannot legally obtain at home.

NVIDIA's transformation is the business story of the AI era. What started as a gaming GPU company pivoted into accelerated computing at exactly the right time. The company went public in 1999, but the real inflection came when cloud companies realized GPUs could train AI models faster than anything else. By the time ChatGPT launched, NVIDIA had already built the CUDA software moat that made switching to competitors nearly impossible.

You have a very nice haircut. Did you cut it yourself?' Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale, earnestly poses that question to a bewildered analyst in the movie 'The Big Short,' which chronicles the investor's massive bet against the mid-2000s housing bubble. The memorable scene is based on a misguided comment the real-life Burry once made, which he revealed in a comment on his Substack.

Big Tech keeps raising its spending plans for artificial intelligence infrastructure, yet shares of Nvidia Corp., one of the biggest beneficiaries of that flood of cash, have been largely stagnant for months. The stock is up less than 1% since the beginning of the fourth quarter and has been largely range bound despite hitting a record high in late October.

The potential policy shift matters because Nvidia's H20 chip, designed specifically for the Chinese market, has been effectively shut out. The Commerce Secretary confirmed strict U.S. licensing terms for H200 AI chip exports to China, and Q2 FY26 results showed zero H20 sales to China due to export restrictions. That's billions in revenue left on the table for a company trading at 46.68x trailing earnings with a $4.63 trillion market cap.

The markets are a mixed bag in the first trading session of February as technology stocks reach a fork in the road. Bullish performance out of Oracle ( Nasdaq: ORCL) stock is being overshadowed by a declining Nvidia ( Nasdaq; NVDA) share price amid uncertainty around its OpenAI investment, damaging overall market sentiment to kick things off. Oracle has recaptured the spotlight as traders and investors cheer the legacy software giant's plans to pour $50 billion into AI-related capex.

Still, Nvidia wants the business because China is a huge market. The latest approvals came during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to China this week, according to sources who spoke with Reuters on the condition of anonymity. Other Chinese firms are now waiting for their own approvals in future rounds, though Beijing is attaching conditions to the licenses that have not yet been finalized.

Artificial intelligence has been a growth driver for the economy, and AI stocks have become massive winners over the past two years. Some of these stocks have been hotter than the others, and one of the biggest beneficiaries is NVIDIA ( Nasdaq: NVDA). The company made the most of the AI boom, and its shares have skyrocketed over the last two years.